Many corporate enterprises collect and store important and sensitive business information and critical business applications in one or more central “locations” referred to as data centers. A data center typically comprises a plurality of computers, e.g., data servers, and/or virtual machines, collectively referred to as “computer” node devices. The computer node devices can be clustered physically and/or distributed, that is, they can reside in a single location or be distributed in several locations, communicatively coupled to one another by a network. Typically, access to a data center is restricted to authorized users and/or client devices. Thus, the data center and its internal network are typically protected by several layers of security that are implemented via network devices, e.g., gateway node devices, routers and switches, and internal firewalls.
In today's global economy, large corporate enterprises typically are required to maintain data centers throughout the world. The cost and effort associated with controlling and managing these global data centers can be daunting. For example, storage node devices, e.g., server farms, must be purchased and maintained throughout the world. In order to ease the burden of controlling and managing such resources, and to earn a higher return on their capital investments, global enterprises are consolidating global data centers, critical business applications, and data onto shared computer node devices, e.g., server node devices. Recently a new trend has been developing where enterprises rent computer resources from other resource owners in a so called “cloud computing” business model.
While consolidation reduces the management cost for controlling global resources, either owned or rented, it also presents new and serious security issues. For instance, when restricted resources, e.g., sensitive business applications and data, are placed together along with unrestricted resources on one or more shared node devices, users who are authorized to access the unrestricted resources, but unauthorized to access the restricted resources, can potentially gain access to the restricted resources because they reside in a shared node. To address this issue, restricted resources can be “locked-down” in a restricted computer node device that is accessible only to authorized users. Nevertheless, when such a strategy is adopted, the restricted node device cannot be shared, thus defeating the cost advantages gained from consolidation. Moreover, when a renting enterprise is using rented computer node devices, the “lock-down” of such devices can be very difficult to implement as the rented computer node devices can be physically located remotely and the physical network management can be managed by the leasing company and not necessarily available to the renting enterprise.
Moreover, the security issues are further complicated for an enterprise that collaborates with other enterprises, vendors and/or customers who require access to some, but not all, of the business applications and data in a data center. In most cases, the access, which can be across and between enterprise domains, must be temporary and/or must change dynamically and on demand from day to day.
Currently, to address these security issues, enterprises rely on applications to provide security in terms of user access and privilege control, and/or on physical network infrastructure to permanently segregate access (e.g. VLAN and firewall). These approaches, however, are ineffective and/or cumbersome and do not fit into the newly developed business trend. For instance, in a fixed network infrastructure for security segregation, modifying access privileges requires an administrator to modify manually the network settings and configurations of the network node devices, which is very inefficient and is not on demand. Moreover, network segregation necessarily eliminates node device sharing, which compounds the inefficiency. In such an environment, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to implement policy based and “elastic” network segregation, which is integrated with user role based access control. As for using applications to provide security, when the number of applications is large, the burden on an administrator to check every feature of every application to ensure all potential security breaches are covered is unreasonable.